I spent most of my working career in British Telecom as an engineer in satellite communications, a field which further stimulated my boyhood interest in astronomy. In the later years I was much involved with the international satellite organisations, Intelsat, Eutelsat and Inmarsat. I left BT at age 54 and worked as a consultant until retiring in 1997 at the age of 61.

I am married to Doreen and we have 7 children and 12 grandchildren. We live in Swanage a seaside resort in Dorset in south-west England. We are surrounded by beautiful countryside and our house has views over the hills and sea. If you are familiar with the novels of Thomas Hardy then Dorset is the area where most of them are set.

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Our joint interests are the garden, exploring the local area, birdwatching and local interest groups (eg. local history). Doreen does quite a bit of voluntary work and I am involved with other engineers in supporting a local school on anything related to engineering.

My own interests also include astronomy, watercolour painting (see separate page), reading (especially about evolution, science and religion and cosmology), and mathematics and computing.

I am a member of the Wessex Astronomy Society which meets monthly in Wimborne, about 25 miles away.

I have written computer programs on various things that interest me but the most notable is a planetarium type program, which has evolved over 20 years, having been written originally for my first personal computer in 1980, a commodore Pet. The program now serves to control the telescope and has a number of features designed for my specific needs and not found in most commercial software. I also use my own image-processing software for much of the work on my CCD images. Both these programs were developed using the DOS-based Quickbasic language. I have now converted the image-processing program to be Windows based using Visual Basic. This presented some difficulty because of the extensive reliance on assembly code routines.